skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most important things financially are cash flow and coffer size. Being able to take on debt at advantageous times provides both of these things because it allows you to shift cash flow temporally and increase the money you have on hand at will. A rich person can translate portions of their future earnings into large amounts of capital on command, and this can come in the form of future anticipated earnings too (e.g., future anticipated rents or sales) while still being able to live on a day-to-day basis. Being able to control your current and future finances can also provide tax benefits if structured correctly.

Poor people can't do that - they need all of their cash now just to live, all the time.
This is a life changing book. It demystifies the biggest part of our lives, which is money (and debt) and helps you contextualize your world by looking into the past. It's the best researched book on the subject.
Makes sense! For burpees, I think the jump part is perhaps 'just noise', in the sense that if you are accurately counting the push-up at the bottom (i.e. can ignore 'the noise' in-between push-ups) then it would work fine. Just a thought.
I have begun to think of this as a "large population error", and I'm noticing it in a lot of different markets.

At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions.

At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Perhaps you don't want the "pathological" customers, to borrow one of Patrick McKenzie's terms. You can make more money with less effort by being more selective about your customers.

At extremely large scales, you largely stop thinking about groups of customers altogether. All of your decisions are driven by aggregates -- did all sales go up this quarter, or down? The effort required to do a deep dive into the behaviors and preferences of any individual market segment may not make sense anymore on a quarterly basis. At this scale, you might be able to afford to annoy tens of thousands of customers and still have a very nice graph next quarter.

So, when someone says a business practice shouldn't be "tolerated", that's a perfectly reasonable position, except it doesn't actually work for businesses operating at extremely large scales. It's too difficult for customers to organize a protest in a way that will influence that business's decision-making.

So much business has moved online in the last 20 years, while the US has leveled off at 80% urbanization over the same time period, along with more and more businesses congealing into BigCos, combined with the recent domination of private equity: lots and lots of things are now operating at a scale where customer concerns just aren't a part of the business model anymore.

Coffee shops, fast food, big-box retail, online retail, SaaS, PaaS: all of these can thrive while running on exorbitant pricing and abusive customer policies, because their volume of customers is so large that it's nearly impossible to be so bad that you'll piss off enough customers to impact your decision-making. (Unless you're Sony.)
https://v.redd.it/s0qwj8td9tyc1
Ever seen an electrical fire? Nasty business.

It'd cost me $20k to install an induction stove, not buying it.

I lose power in SF 3-4 times a year, have never lost gas. Last power outage I cooked with gas and it was great. I have gas heat too, always works.
ca. 2000s, I'm getting rid of my TV because if you have one in Germany, you have to pay the fee...

ca. 2003, I'm getting rid of my tv-card which has been free until now, or else I have to pay a fee...

ca. 2010, They've got a website now, if you have a computer or phone, you gotta pay the fee...

great... now I have to pay the fee because I have a github... or what
Agreed, Dennett hit all of the high points of the who-am-I philosophy in a really entertaining story. It also reminded me of a great Greg Egan story, Learning To Be Me:

https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me...

This is focused on just one aspect of the philosophical dilemma, and both Dennett and Egan touch on the horror of it in delightful ways.
the second I read it I knew it was Greek
I have actually thought of using the name for an app before years ago, but it never happened as I thought it's... a bit rude?
not sure if this applies when exposing your app to a mostly non-greek audience though
Sadly, the only micropayments implementation we have is ad-supported apps. It's essentially micropayments. Albeit a very annoying implementation!
> It takes a lot of government subsidies to make that happen

No doubt, but the upside is a populace not especially at risk to interest rates which is absolutely crushing and systemically risky currently.

> in particular the government assumes the credit risk on something like 85% of US mortgages.

In Canada, CMHC does something similar so I am not sure we get away with anything special that the Americans are not.
Not pulling up the ladder behind you
Starbucks is the way for people who don't actually like coffee to still enjoy it.

It's the corona of beers: simple and easy to drink even if you hate the bitterness from coffee.

If you already enjoy proper espressos, French press and the likes, then it's clearly not for you.
So go with hetzner?
Watch live: NASA and Boeing's Starliner test flight launches from Cape Canaveral [video]
17 was AP Calc 2. Division can be taught as early as 7, probably earlier if you’re doing enrichment at home.
Loved this story. Surprised to find how simple and straightforward his writing is here, when in discussions on free will he was much more obfuscatory. Is it due to the difference in difficulty between posing interesting questions and giving good answers?
Taiwan's Housing Crisis
I've never played Pokemon Go, but I played a lot of the JRPG titles from nearly 30 years ago.

What determines success in Go? Is it battles, or is it literally just collecting Pokemon?
In the US. I don't know much of anything about Canada.
I like the IXL workbooks. They seem good enough.
Home prices definitely went down during the great recession.
So it's interesting. Everything you ask for here is something I, personally, as an independent wanna-get-my-hands-dirty nerd, would ask for too. I totally get where you're coming from.

But the thing is - the reason large companies often don't give folks like you and me these things is becuase there are proven reasons to do the contrary that actually end up making them more money. It sucks, but it's reality.

1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website.

2. Offering immediate free trials where you can jump in right away is the ideal world for nerds -- again, I love it personally. But software is often complex, and a guided demo/implementation is often the best path to make sure your buyers are actually successful. Otherwise you risk a lot of folks who sign up, jump in, have no idea what they're doing, and then abandon the trial immediately and go to a competitor who held their hand.

3. "Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0..." If only offering Freemium were so simple. You will immediately have to deal with porn (it's always porn - and often kiddie porn. These people will figure out incredibly creative ways to use your SaaS product to host illegal content one way or another), spam, fraud, customer service issues, etc. There are many valid reasons to offer Freemium. There are many valid reasons not to do so. It's just not so simple.

4. Again, think about the flip side here. Lower friction to sign-ups without a card, but SO much hassle when it comes time to pay -- now you have to nag, bug, etc. to get payment, and then you have to delete accounts that are dormant. And you have much lower buying intent signals, etc. etc. etc.

I wish the world of software catered to folks like us, but I fully and completely understand why it doesn't.
Both Core Weave & Lambda Labs have fairly predatory pricing making it impossible to rent GPUs without a yearly contract.

This doesn't make sense for training models, where a training run is on the scale of days & weeks.

I wished that the techcrunch article mentioned other companies, like sfcompute, which offer hourly compute instead of yearly contracts.
The Clowder Project: an online resource for category theory and mathematics
Thanks for this. I’d never heard of this option and once again I am shocked at how much better Americans have it than Canadians when it comes to mortgages.
> Nobody wants a return to the locker room ethos of earlier newsrooms where a mist of testosterone hung in the air, where every other desk had an opened bottle of scotch on it...Surely there is a path back from the milquetoastery of contemporary journalism to something approximating swagger.

Maybe "swagger" and the "locker room ethos" are symbiotic, and trying to wipe away the latter killed (or at least weakened) the former? I don't think the world is so neat and tidy that we can have our ideological cake and eat it too, and I'm sure lot of fashionable programs will have severe consequences (due to subtle and not-so-subtle contradictions).

If doesn't help that actual output often seems pretty far down on the list of priorities, and as a society there seems to be little appetite do deal with predictable problems before they become absolute disasters (and sometimes not even then).
Don't know how interesting it is, but I used the David Readme Compiler a lot in the past to create simple executable readme to accompany software and as a small knowledge base.

It created a simple dialog-based menu that allow to explore topic and search through them (and edit and print). I think it used Turbo-Vision, but I may be misremembering.
Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once!

If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
based on the definition of what a security and what a commodity, it should be abundantly clear to anyone over the age of 5 what crypto falls under:

Commodities are consumable goods that get transformed through usage in industrial or commercial processes. Gold and silver can be transformed into jewelry. Securities, on the other hand, grant holders the right to periodic benefits like dividends, coupons, principal repayments and potential profit shares.

How are you consuming crypto? What commercial or industrial process are being used?
Do you have any you would recommend? I'll love you for a link, and like you for a brand name. Not being a dick here, I'm genuinely looking for one that I don't have to lose sleep over installing.
It has 3kwh and the stove costs $6k + installation.
Based on their specs thats less than an hour.

Gas stovetop costs $400 and just works.
> it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price

The cheapest customers are always the most expensive to work with. It’s a sad reality.

I worked at several companies who for some foolish reason saw the cheapo customers as some untapped market and when they raced to the bottom they lost every time.
Blog posts, like long showers, are often for arguments you've already lost.
Here is one easy way to solve this problem based on my current workflow: ChatGPT recognizes the novel pseudo addition you arrive at in your coding and prompts you to review the Q&A summary it creates and posts on your behalf. I would happily do this.
You must have a much more advanced relationship to errors than me. I don’t think I could tell the difference between 100k or 40k lines worth of errors, and it was only halfway through writing this message that I realized you might actually be talking about the size of an error? Oh no.
Less advanced economies have discovered this pricing innovation, but are generally not able to scale it beyond hostess bar scams and the like :)
The poetic science of how cicadas sing
I've found similar! It's been most useful for me in help with making personal decisions and things like that
> Many commenters seem to be missing the distinction that makes the difference between "real" vs "fake" balsamic vinegar as mentioned in the title.

No "real" is mentioned in the title. And any suggestion the common, non-trad variety is fake is conspicuously absent from the body.
The fume hood/microwave above the stove combos that seem to be standard now are terrible. They vent poorly and clog quickly. The microwave internals don't leave enough room for a wide vent, and the ventilation is shared by the microwave (which also means the microwave dies when it clogs).
I use the great, free, "Suspicious Package" app [0] to inspect installers like these.

In fact, it was Supertone Shift's installer that prodded me to seek it out (I happened to find and install Shift a couple of weeks ago).

In this case, it needs admin permissions to install to `/Library/Application Support` as well as `/Library/Audio`.

It needs to restart in order for the HAL driver to be loaded (this provides the virtual audio interface for using the app with Teams, Zoom, etc.)

The preinstall/postinstall scripts simply handle the app's directory in Application Support.

I decided it was safe enough, and had some fun playing with it. It contacts what it claims are licensing servers (when it starts), and won't start without it. It wanted to keep contacting those servers constantly, but blocking its network access via Little Snitch didn't prevent it from functioning. The network traffic was in the single-digit kilobyte range, so I felt reasonably confident no audio data was being looted.

[0] https://mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/
You have to pay a fee if you live in Germany. It does not matter what kind of technology you have access to in theory. Thank god the German state does not have to check whether or not you have to own a TV.
Yes! I absolutely loved Egan's idea of the Jewel, and of course it turns out Dennett predates him by about a decade.
Which is especially weird for the country that fought the cold war to show the supremacy of capitalism; a system that is based on market actors knowing the price and value of every product and service offered and making rational purchase decisions based on that.
Weird proposition. In both cases you would pay for the second usage and the free trial just proved that you need their product and they definitely should not let you use it for free
I bet LLMs would be pretty good at that since there's likely a large repository of public domain botany drawings from the past few hundred years.
State schools are not ivy league expensive, but they are not cheap anymore.

of course the degree matters. You pay about the same for art and engineering degrees but one will earn far more than the other.
I bought an WV eUP! (2014) this winter and it is basically a "regular" car with normal physical buttons + a small Garmin GPS.

It's nothing like new cars, electric or not, with big screens and almost no buttons, and a bunch of privacy violating sensors and telemetry tech built in. It does have a 2G GSM and a GPS antenna, but the 2G network is soon turned off here in Norway.

And it's hacakble! You can buy an open source replacement for the remote control of charging and climate control! I love this car and I'm not tempted at all by Tesla and the like, they are a privacy nightmare.
Opera's Aria Now Comes with Image Generation and Voice Output
You're confusing "free press" with "enemy disinformation campaign".
Better Stack offers heartbeat monitoring for free, here's the docs:
https://betterstack.com/docs/uptime/cron-and-heartbeat-monit...

Disclaimer: I'm the founder
A leak-hosting site looks to thaw the chill of censorship
You can get much cheaper dedicated servers with alternative providers such as OVH.
yes, but it continued:

ca. 2015, you have to pay it anyway, with no exemptions

ca. 2020, they start randomly sending out delay penalties, even if you are late by days, without ever notifying you of the due dates

ca. 2022, they sneakily shift the 3-months fee forward, first you can pay it at the end of the period, then in the middle month, then soon at the beginning

meanwhile, the programming gets worse and worse every year. Then they get surprised if people vote for parties which promise to abolish it.
kwh x $

Price is generally a dollar figure for 1000W per hour.
I've worked at companies that were spending 6 figures a month on AWS and we had dedicated AWS employees who helped us understand our bill and keep pricing in check. We also had GCP and Azure reps constantly reaching out to see if they could win us over by showing us how they could lower our bill. Overcharging enterprise customers for things they're not using is actually a risk to AWS as it gives customers a reason to jump ship.

The whales on AWS aren't overspending because AWS uses the granularity of their billing to make sure they aren't. That's how they keep the whales happy.

For the little guys, I'm not even sure it's worth AWS's time to nickel and dime them. AWS hands out thousands to ten of thousands of dollars in credits like candy. I'm pretty sure it's more important to them to lock in whales when they're still minnows than to bilk an extra $500 a year out of a 10 person start up.
Wow, I had no idea it was that iffy under the hood. I might do more messing with the flash if it gets goofier. Yes, the issues with VC++ got annoying in a hurry.
Yes, actually. I read the article and nowhere does it call the cheaper non-trad variety fake.
Can't wait for the AI to tell me my question is a duplicate and I should write it in JS by importing that single npm library anyway.
No snark, but posting with genuine concern for any homebuyers who didn’t experience the pain of 2008, please read and grok this: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underwater.asp
Rational Reminder is one of the _best_ podcasts I listen to right now. Love the polite Canadian vibe
>I suspect it has or will soon reach the point where the Kelly criterion says mathematically I'd be better off to self-insure

Heh wait till you go to replace the property/damage. Unless you're doing yourself you'd absolutely crap on the floor once you see how high prices have got for this work.

Add to this the increasing incidence of weather/climate related damages to homes and the situation isn't looking good for many states.
When I moved to macOS back in 2011 (OS X back then), from Windows, I was shocked how much the OS pushes me to organise my digital world better than the mess I had in Windows. I never have piles of stuff in my digital life, it’s uncluttered now.

These days I use Linux with both swaywm on a laptop with Arch do-it-yourself Linux, and mainstream Gnome on a Fedora desktop (workstation edition) with almost no fiddling. Both desktop metaphors allow me to organise my digital world very well.

From that point of view the mess of icons on a Windows desktop looks horrible to me. I dread the very thought of using Windows ever again. I dread I’ll be given the locked Windows laptop and forced to use it.

I know it’s not that bad. Especially, if you just need to perform some tasks in some GUI apps, especially if those are Microsoft apps anyway. Still, I have the fear. My Linux familiarity created me a very vulnerable place of comfort and possibly an illusion the things would be that way forever (for me). Which can be true, actually.
“Let’s just assume impossible things are part of reality not fiction and then use that as a basis for philosophical theories of identity and the self”
How is this tool different from https://quip.com/? I don't see any features that set it aside except "Conclude" button.
If something else depends on the successful semantic analysis of those poisoned nodes, they get poisoned as well. It's all based on dependency.
Just start speaking. The surrealism would be amazing. Just tell them there's clearly something wrong with Zoom. Everyone will buy it.

Also, it's just yet another reason that I'm so happy my Zoom meetings do not require a camera feed. There's just something Orwellian to me about having to have a camera on me. Having a camera on me is my absolute nightmare regardless of the purpose of the camera.
We need to rethink the foundations.
How does CQ2 compare to Zulip?
Sent my application about a month ago, still got no response :(
And with that decision, they killed most of the UWP goodwill on Windows desktop as well.
A personal website built with markdown and javascript. A website generator to keep that personal site up to date. A utility to download and parse Electronic Programme Guides to schedule TV shows I want to watch. Scripts to build dynamic email signatures for my multiple email accounts. Many others that I no longer use.
May be I'm spoiled by postgres, but transactional ID allocator sounds like a problem solved in every database. Is there issues somewhere?
Already do :-)
And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
> So what would make it fake?

Claiming to be something it is not.
You care if you have a mortgage and you live in a non-US country where interest rates can actually go up to price you out of it.
So you're saying that they can't implement a hard limit, yet are able to provide hard-limited trials / student credits?
It's impossibly hard to believe they couldn't implement the pre-paid model
You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)
This appears to be the logical build up to his critique of the Cartesian Theater . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
Unfortunately, not making archived content available longer is due to the legal obligations that the public broadcasters face and that the German Government and the governments of the federal states themselves have put in place because of anti-competitive fear mongering.
SEC Prepares to Sue Robinhood over Crypto Unit
Yes but why would someone do it in a way that’s not interesting to me personally? Bad form for sure. /s
Agreed 100 percent. Software is the easy part. Getting HVAC, power and network up to the levels of cloud providers is difficult to get right and prohibitively expensive.

For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs.
These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.
Is there a pre-paid option?
The difference between an experienced C++ programmer and a C++ novice is that the novice regularly believes that his code is broken beyond repair for eternity and has accidentally destroyed the compiler and most of the hard drive, while the former just yawns at 5,000 lines of error messages and adds the missing semicolon.
this doesn't make any sense. If tomorrow, I decide to cross the same street to buy a $50,000 watch, now suddenly I am valuing my life 1000x? And what about the next day, when I go to cross the same street for a $5 cup of coffee again?
Simple fix is to run an extension cord from the neighbors house and use that to host your monitoring equipment.